Weingrad Jeff - Saturday night: a backstage history of Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

By Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad

Copyright 2011 by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad

Cover Copyright 2011 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

The authors are hereby established as the sole holders of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or authors may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 1986.

Saturday Night Live photographs and program excerpts courtesy of The National Broadcasting Company, Inc. National Broadcasting Company, Inc. 1985. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from the following:

Ballad of a Thin Man, This Wheels On Fire, Gotta Serve Somebody, by Bob Dylan,

Bob Dylan Music Co., used by permission.

King Tut, by Steve Martin, Colorado Music, used by permission.

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Saturday Night

A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

By Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad

Untreed Reads edition of Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live celebrates the 25th anniversary of this widely acclaimed books publication.

This is the original history of Saturday Night Live. It tells the shows story from its conception in early 1975 through the end of its 10th season in 1985.

The authors would like to underscore at the outset that this book is about peoplehighly creative and consciously eccentric people, for the most partwho were operating under extreme pressure. In particular, the effects on the psyche of major stardom, though a part of popular legend, are underestimated. Readers are urged to keep this in mind.

For the sake of the shows writers, we would like to point out that in almost every instance where weve quoted sketches, they are excerpts, not the complete scripts. Readers should note in addition that we have usually used the name Saturday Night instead of Saturday Night Live because the former is shorter, and because thats what many of the people who worked there called it, unless they just said SNL or the show.

Contents

Mirrors and Blue Smoke

It wouldnt be the first time Dick Ebersol had pitched the new program called Saturday Night without having more than the vaguest idea of what that program would be.

This time his audience was management: executives from most of NBCs 219 local affiliated stations around the country who had gathered at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles for their May 1975 convention. NBCs affiliate conventions in those days were typically described as love feasts, more occasions for golf, gourmet dinners, and celebratory toasts of champagne than for arguments about the way the network was handling its business.

True, NBC had trailed CBS in the prime-time ratings for more than twenty years. But the profits in second place were enormous, and in 1975, CBS seemed more within reach than it had for many seasons. Advertising revenues, and profits, were rising to unimagined new heights. Let ABC suffer, as it always had, the humiliation of being a distant third. Televisions longstanding status quo was, for those at NBC, very comfortable indeed. There was as yet no inkling that within the year the status quo would be overturned and NBC would find itself, for the first time in its history, in third place.

Dick Ebersol was counting on the affiliates cheerful mood to discourage any bothersome questions about the new program he was about to describe. Ebersol, who had joined NBC just nine months before as director of weekend late-night programming, cut a somewhat strange figure on the podium. At twenty-seven he was shockingly young for a network executive. He was tall and pug-nosed. His hair hung down to his shoulders in a Prince Valiant cut that framed his head like a helmet. The lenses of his glasses were so thick they looked like miniature TV sets. Usually he wore bizarre patchwork sports jackets of brightly colored madras more suggestive of the Brothers Ringling than the Brothers Brooks, but, in deference to the affiliates, that day he chose a muted dark suit. At a time when businessmen still worried about radicals running wild in the streets, Ebersol, his long hair evenly trimmed and well washed, his tailored suit neatly pressed, came across as less dangerous than curious, an odd combination of rebellious youth and white-collar convention.

Despite his youth, Ebersol was no newcomer to speaking at network affairs. He had come to NBC after spending seven years as an aide and surrogate son to the legendary Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports. Ebersol had produced a number of sporting events on weekends for ABC, but his main job had been representing Arledge at the dozens of meetings and conferences each year that Arledge habitually avoided. Ebersol knew enough, then, to come to his first appearance before NBCs affiliates with several jokes written out on index cards to help fill the empty spotsof which there were quite a fewin his speech.

The affiliates had heard a little about Saturday Night from a press release NBC had issued a couple of weeks before. The release had been hurried through in anticipation of the affiliates convention; whatever chance Saturday Night had for success would depend on the affiliates agreeing to carry it on their stations. But the networks public relations experts had been unable to mask how little theyd had to go on when they wrote it.

The show was described as a new concept in late-evening programminga live, 90-minute comedy-variety series titled Saturday Night. It was to originate from studio 8H in NBCs 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in New York beginning October 11. The producer, the release said, would be Lorne Michaels, who had won an Emmy award a year before for his writing on a Lily Tomlin special.

The release went on to list some of Michaelss other credits: producer of a Flip Wilson special, a writer for Laugh-In, co-host and producer of The Hart and Lorne Show on Canadian television, and a writer for British televisions Monty Python. All but the last credit were true. Ebersol was quoted as saying that Michaels was the best young producer in the comedy-variety field (he was actually two years older than Ebersol), but its likely that none of the affiliates had ever heard of him. And if they had, they might have reflected that there were very few young producers in the comedy-variety field in 1975, mainly because comedy-variety was then considered a dying form.

That was about as specific as the release had gotten. Further quotations from Ebersol stated that